Ovarian cancer is the leading cause of gynecological cancer related-death in the developed world. Although progress has been made in its treatment by improved debulking surgery and the introduction of platinum-taxane regimens, the overall 5-year survival is only 29% in advanced stage disease, mostly due to diagnosis at an advance stage and to intrinsic and acquired resistance to platinum based chemotherapy. Identifying molecular markers of ovarian cancer chemoresistance is therefore of crucial importance. Successful translation of findings at the molecular level will lead to individualized treatment regimens, improved chemotherapeutic response rates and avoidance of unnecessary treatments.
In particular, epithelial ovarian cancer is the most common gynecologic malignancy; is highly aggressive and causes almost 125,000 deaths yearly. Despite advances in detection and cytotoxic therapies a very low percentage of patients with advance stage disease survive five years after the initial diagnosis. The high mortality of this disease is mainly due to resistance to the available therapies.
MicroRNAs (miRs) are a class of small non-coding RNAs, which modulate gene expression causing translational repression, mRNA cleavage, or destabilization. They are involved in numerous physiological cellular processes. Most importantly, accumulating evidence indicates that many miRs are aberrantly expressed in human cancers and their expression profiles can classify stage, subtype and prognosis of some cancers.